healthcare reform

The healthcare information age is upon us. With federal incentives to adopt Electronic Medical Records (EMR), more and more medical practices are going paperless. An important benefit of EMR is ease of data collection and analysis. As patient treatments and outcomes are stored electronically, rich data sets become available to medical practices. Responses to treatments can be measured and used to guide future treatment decisions. For example, analysis can identify variations in treatment responses by sub-populations, with the promise of more personalized medicine.

In the past, this kind of patient outcomes data analysis was something primarily done by insurance companies, because of their access to lots of patient information. EMR systems now bring this power to the healthcare providers. Now that they have the infrastructure to collect data, they can begin to better understand their own patients. But because this is a newly acquired capability, it may take time before providers fully understand the potential of data analysis.

As an illustration of an organization that does know the power of data, we can turn to the dating website OkCupid. In the same way that EMR digitizes patient record keeping, dating websites have taken the acts of courting (answering personal questions, winking, being rejected, lining up dates and hopefully finding love) digital. And just like EMR, records of these transactions provide rich data sets for analysis. OkCupid does a great job of analyzing user interactions through the site and sharing interesting trends that they identify via a blog they call OkTrends. Read the rest of this entry »

ACOs are like the weather. Everyone is talking about them, no one knows what they will really bring.

ACO Overview

While the term Accountable Care Organization originated in 2006, ACOs were brought into the spotlight through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) legislation passed in March 2010. An ACO is a healthcare provider entity/network that includes the full spectrum of care including PCPs, specialists, hospitals, long term care, etc. The main principle of ACOs is to unify providers and improve coordination of patient care with the goal of improving patient outcomes and decreasing cost of care. Read the rest of this entry »